A life of experiences

Finance

It’s been an eventful couple of months! Our second child turned one, we bought a house, sold another, packed up everything and moved!

We are now the proud owners of a larger, roomier, newer and all around better house than the one we had (and that wasn’t too bad either). One downside: there’s now a new and significantly higher mortgage that we have to deal with, so we have to start all over again in our quest of living mortgage free.

Current debt: 418.000 euros. Let’s bring that down to under 400k before the end of the year. With the money we gained from selling our old house, that shouldn’t be too hard. After that, we’ll see how things go, but chipping away at our new mortgage is definitely going to be an important part of our financial strategy for the coming years!

Just a quick update: as of today ‘our’ house is a little more in our possession, rather than the bank’s! At the start of the year I pledged to put at least another 10k towards paying off our mortgage. As business – or rather my fulltime freelancing – has been going rather well so far, we decided to go ahead and make another payment already, and even better: we put in 15k instead of the 10k we were going for. This will again significantly decrease the monthly interest payment, so we can save even more now. Snowball effect!

I am even looking at putting in another payment before the end of the year, but we probably won’t decide whether or not to do that until November or December. If business keeps going well for us it is definitely doable. But I’m already pretty happy with this step forward!

This post is written by a happy and slightly richer person.. This weekend I managed to resell a used laptop I bought earlier for a healthy profit. I bought the laptop from the organization where I am currently doing a project and who bought new laptops for all their employees. They needed to get rid of the old ones and so I was able to buy one for cheap, only 75 euros. I resold it through the Dutch version of Craigslist for more than double, 175 euros. I lost a couple of bucks as I decided to pay for the shipping, but still, I more than doubled my investment!

I’ll probably never be a salesman though as I don’t like the process of haggling and the annoyance that comes from potential buyers you never hear from again after their first inquiry or bid. But still, I managed to make a little money and check off another item from my list in the process, which is great!

Inspired by blogs such as www.mrmoneymustache.com, we’ve been handling our money pretty consciously in the past couple of years. This has led to me being able to pay off all of my student debt way faster than I imagined, and today we have taken the next step towards a financially sound and secure future by making what is hopefully the first of many speedy extra payments towards our mortgage.

Even though we are not particularly high earners (I’m not saying we don’t make enough, but we’re no rock stars either), through making solid and well-thought decisions we have been able to save up for the first € 10.000 payment in just over half a year. I’m even more proud of this because we still managed to pay for a holiday and some new furniture in those six months as well, and I’m not even mentioning the extra costs that a baby boy brings to the table..

Hopefully, we can keep up this tempo and pay off our mortgage, or at least enable us to move house in the next couple of years, as we would love to do so but unfortunately can’t at the moment. Yet. Paying off our mortgage is already a highly addictive game, especially when you see that the monthly payment for the next 20+ years steadily decreases with every extra payment.. I’ll play that game!

This is a big one as well, and one that might take us a couple of decades to achieve. Nevertheless, paying off the mortgage on our current house (or the one on our new house, in case our planned move within a couple of years comes through) is something we are going to be focusing on, now that my student loans have been paid of in full as of last December.

The main reason behind this one is that the greatest part of our monthly payments is interest (currently we even only pay interest), so the original mortgage sum has remained intact since we bought our house five years ago. Now that we have some more money available, we will try and put as much as possible towards our mortgage. It will take time, but seeing our monthly payments go down should be a nice motivator, and I can imagine that the feeling of living for free (except for maintenance and utilities, of course) will be awesome.

Currently we owe 238.500 euros, so there’s a pretty long way to go, but I will try and make a significant payment at least once a year, starting at the end of this year.

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ABOUT

Hi, I'm Bas! Welcome to my personal weblog, where I keep track of all the things I want to do before I kick the bucket, and the actions I take in order to achieve them. I hope this will inspire you to do something similar. Life's too short!